Google's artificial intelligence program, AlphaGo, just won its second Go match against a human

Google’s artificial intelligence program, AlphaGo, just won its second Go match against a human

TWO : NIL to the computer. That was the score, as The Economist went to press, in the latest round of the battle between artificial intelligence (AI) and the naturally evolved sort. The field of honour is a Go board in Seoul, South Korea—a country that cedes to no one, least of all its neighbour Japan, the title of most Go-crazy place on the planet. To the chagrin of many Japanese, who think of Go as theirs in the same way that the English think of cricket, the game’s best player is generally reckoned to be Lee Sedol, a South Korean. But not, perhaps, for much longer. Mr Lee is in the middle of a five-game series with AlphaGo, a computer program written by researchers at DeepMind, an AI software…